Listen to your adviser, Nicola! You are failing a generation of young Scots

NICOLA Sturgeon’s failings on two of her supposed top priorities were exposed this week – by an adviser she appointed.

Naomi Eisenstadt, a distinguished expert on issues of poverty and inequality, published her review into the life chances of young people in Scotland.

Now, for an SNP Government which talks such a good game on deprivation and social justice, you’d have thought this would be a welcome document. Instead, it laid bare Scottish Government failings on two issues in particular – poverty and education.

Those are two issues Nationalist politicians never tire of lecturing other parties about. Yet now they have been found badly wanting.

We have warned the SNP for years about the consequences of its obsession with universal free tuition, and experts too have said this will only harm the finances of educational establishments.

And the conclusions set out in this report suggest those fears are now coming back to bite the most vulnerable.

Miss Eisenstadt said that while universities had been somewhat protected from the consequences of receiving no tuition fees from Scottish or other EU students, colleges had suffered.

The First Minister has been repeatedly put on the spot about the impact of the SNP’s neglect on colleges, most recently that the number of students in further education had tumbled to a ten-year low.

That’s what happens when an SNP government in sole charge of education decides to decimate college budgets. And, inevitably, it’s the less well-off people who need colleges the most who suffer.

Education is such a vital route for those who want to improve their own circumstances, be that a young school-leaver who isn’t quite ready for university or further training, or a mother who wants to return to work and needs a part-time course to help train for a career change.

The SNP’s decision to turn its back on Scotland’s college sector has hit the poor the hardest, and that is a disgrace for a government that professes to be progressive.

This is a government which encourages the crazy concept whereby the taxes of a lowpaid worker help allow the child of a millionaire to attend university free of charge.

But of course the SNP doesn’t have a problem with tuition fees in principle.

After all, it happily accepts tuition fees from English students, in addition to international students from outside the EU.

That approach ensures that hard-pressed universities have to favour those fee-paying students over domestic ones – another way for the Scottish Government to make it harder for young people from deprived backgrounds to get to university.

Inequality

Every summer it is now routine for courses to have no room left for Scottish students, but if you have the wallet of an English, Chinese or American student, there are places aplenty.

The SNP has never been able to explain how this helps widen access for students from deprived areas.

The inequality in Scotland’s education system runs all the way down from further and higher education into our secondary and primary schools.

Again, despite being a socalled priority, the SNP has done nothing to close the country’s attainment gap.

Still far too many children leave school without the relevant literacy and numeracy skills, ensuring Scotland is slipping down international league tables.

The SNP’s response to that nosedive in performance? To haul us out of the global assessment process altogether to ensure no further humiliation down the line.

As this newspaper itself has noted, this turgid performance from the Scottish Government is failing a generation of young people. Worse, many of them never even get to study the subjects they want because of a lack of options.

That’s to say nothing of the businesses across the country crying out for pupils to emerge from schools with different and better skills than the ones they have currently, for the sake of the whole economy.

And with the attainment gap showing no signs of closing, it’s always going to be the worse-off who suffer, the ones the Nationalists say they’ll support.

It is no wonder voters, from all walks of life, are leaving the SNP in their droves.

Criticism within the report doesn’t stop at education policy.

It may seem to many like a statement of the obvious, but the following passage should be no less chilling for ministers in charge of making Scotland a more equal place:

‘The persistence of the social class gradient is deeply worrying. The fundamental fact remains that life outcomes are largely determined by the wealth and social class of one’s parents at birth. This applies across the social spectrum, not only to the richest and poorest of families. And it represents not just a fundamental unfairness, but also significant waste of talent and opportunity for the economy and social cohesion of Scotland.’

But Nicola Sturgeon shouldn’t need this report to tell her that.

She only needs to stick her head out of her own constituency office to see the devastating inequalities that exist in Glasgow Southside. Since becoming an MSP for the city in 2016, I’ve spent a lot of time in places like Govanhill, talking to those worst affected by the squalor, and being shown around the most horrendous elements of it by the unfortunate people who live there.

And the problem is getting worse. It should be an absolute badge of shame to an SNP government which has now been in charge for more than a decade, yet we hear next to nothing of what it intends to do about it.

No legislation in Holyrood, and no action on the ground. And we cannot let any analysis of the SNP’s approach to poverty and life chances go by without mention of its solitary objective.

Whinge

It’s all very well for the SNP to whinge about Westminster, but things would be far more bleak for Scotland’s poorest communities if the nationalists had managed to break up Britain in 2014.

We would have been left staring into a £15billion black hole, and that would have meant slashing public services for those who need them most, and hiking taxes on hardworking people in a move which would have left the public with less money in their pocket, and an economy suffering from being badly uncompetitive against its immediate neighbour.

The SNP wanted to make the referendum about social matters, but it was found out at every turn.

Nicola Sturgeon will rue the day she pretended education was more important to her than independence.

Almost every week we see figures and evidence showing schools and colleges are moving in the wrong direction, and any reform she’s reluctantly come up with won’t go anything like far enough.

That, combined with some of the findings from this report, reinforce this First Minister and her SNP government as one-trick ponies, only truly serious about delivering one thing – the ripping out of Scotland from the United Kingdom, at all and every cost.